are the children of locals, or local teachers, it still requires a extrinsically motivated consensus of some kind.
neighbours could lead to intimidation and bullying. 1h Self-build zones Although we should reject the idea that people act only out of self-interest, neither can we rely on the opposite. If the aim is to unlock self-provided housing as a sustainable mass-housing industry, the approach cannot be dependent on pure altruism or a semi-altruistic investment in the common good (as valuable as those things are). To hope that paid work can simply be ‘subcontracted’ to altruists would be cynical and ultimately unsuccessful. The approach must be designed primarily to harness people’s basic desire to find land, and build high-quality, sustainable homes for themselves to live in and own. At the same time, this must be done in such a way as to cause minimum imposition upon existing neighbourhoods.
The only communities who seem to fit this mould are those in remote coastal locations such as rural Scotland, Northumbria or Cornwall, for whom economic and social density is crucial to the survival of the settlement, and often where houses being bought as holidays homes have inflated property prices beyond the reach of people born in the neighbourhood. In these remote areas, communities have to build houses because speculative developers never would. However, in most of the UK this impetus doesn’t really exist. If anything, it is possible that some communities might build housing as a defense mechanism (i.e. to counter the threat of a speculative housebuilder doing so), but it is more likely still that communities will simply not be motivated to develop at all (and certainly not on a scale which will meet national housing need). This is a problem the Community Right to Build will need to overcome. In order to be realistic - that is, to harness the real grain of motivation - the concept of a Right to Build must be accountable to a constituency not just of those already living in an area but those who wish to move to that area.
That would suggest a need to establish whole new self-providing neighbourhoods or zones through the planning system, where it is understood from the outset that your own Right to Build extends to your neighbours and the whole community. These village or town-sized sites could be established on under-used agricultural land or exindustrial sites . These could be purchased through a ‘buy now, pay later’ and/or a land-auction system, using the value-uplift created by planning consent to fund the cost of infrastructure and allowing plots to be purchased at prices affordable for first-time buyers.
As an aside, it is also worth mentioning that the Community Right to Build must also confront some associated moral hazards, such as the issue of accountability and legitimacy, the risk of corruption (private companies manipulating certain influential members of a community to gain access) and even the risk that un-arbitrated politics between
One way or another, if the population is going to
16. It is worth noting that one of the general weaknesses in both the Community Right to Build and the Localism Bill is that it struggles to define what a community actually is, and if it is a geographical entity, where its boundaries should be drawn.
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